Engagement with our Facebook fans down 50% after News Feed change

The new Facebook News Feed settings

In early February, as reported by Inside Facebook, Facebook made an overnight change to its news feed settings. From that point users have been able to show posts from “Friends and pages you interact with most” or from “All of your friends and pages.”

Since this change, our level of interaction with our 50,000 Facebook fans has gone south in fairly dramatic fashion.

For example, on January 18, before the change was made, we posted an update about Sir Trevor McDonald’s Secret Mediterranean TV programme. It received 106,045 impressions (the raw number of times the update was seen on our wall and in the News Feed of our fans), 113 likes and 49 comments.

Last week, on March 30, we posted something very similar about Kirsty and Phil’s new series Vacation, Vacation, Vacation. The result? 49,683 impressions, 35 likes and 16 comments. This is typical these days. Our posts used to regularly get more than 100,000 impressions, now we never get above the 50,000 mark. This despite the fact that we have more Facebook fans now than we did on the day Facebook made its fateful change.

After digging a bit deeper, it seems that many users have been defaulted to only seeing posts from “Friends and Pages you interact with most.” As a result, lots of content which they would previously have seen is being hidden from them without their knowledge.

What to do? We’re about to update our Facebook page to inform our fans about the change and how to edit their News feed settings but, of course, the people we’re trying to reach won’t see the message! And we’ve emailed Facebook for their comments. We’re pretty confident that we’re not alone in being a brand with a sizeable Facebook following who is troubled by this large reduction in the level of interaction with its fans. It will be interesting to see what they say.